The lab phone rang, and Julie picked up. It was the night guard reporting that the pizza had arrived. "Be right down," she said, and hung up. She went around the corner and found Bugs leaning back in the rolling chair, feet propped up on the system desk, watching the colored bars dancing on the screen.
"Pizza's here, your turn," she said.
"Right," he said, "Take over." He left and Julie sat down, wondering when they would finally find this bug. Whenever they ran the test with the Marigold module, the system failed immediately. When they swapped out Marigold and put the old rev in, it ran just fine.
They were stumped. After three weeks of long nights, Julie was becoming convinced that the problem could only be in the midnight pizza.
Bugs returned, and they sat down to eat. Partway through the first slice, Julie had a thought. "What if Marigold isn't the problem?"[Brenner 2006]
Chewing a mouthload, Bugs somehow managed, "What?"
When we're stressed,
critical thinking is difficult"I mean, suppose there's a problem in the system itself, and the old rev of this module compensates somehow. The system would work with the old rev, but fail with Marigold."
Bugs stared into his paper plate, but stopped chewing. "You mean…we've wasted three weeks?"
It turned out that Julie was right. Since the system had run flawlessly for years, everyone assumed that the system itself handled the data correctly. But Marigold really did things correctly, and that made it incompatible with the rest of the system. Julie had uncovered an unrecognized assumption, which led them to incorrect conclusions.
Critical thinking is the process of drawing sound inferences based on evidence, principles, and an understanding of the world. When we're stressed, critical thinking is difficult, because so much of our energy is consumed in stress. Unrecognized assumptions are just one kind of failure of critical thinking. Here are three more examples of failures of critical thinking.
- Wishing
- When we want a specific outcome, and incoming information is consistent with that outcome, we tend to believe that the outcome has occurred, even if the data supports alternate explanations.
- Misunderstanding statistics
- When we notice a freakish coincidence, it can seem so unlikely that we feel that it can't be coincidence. We conclude incorrectly that correlation is evidence of connection.
- Rushing to judgment
- When we're aware that we don't have actual proof, but we're sure we're right anyway, we can believe that the proof will emerge soon enough. So we decide that our inference is the truth, and we forget that we don't have proof.
To work effectively on a complex problem, a group needs freedom from panic. When long hours and excessive stress limit our ability to think critically, the problem truly can be in the midnight pizza. Top
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Footnotes
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
Email Antics: III
- Nearly everyone complains that email is a time waster. Yet much of the problem results from our own
actions. Here's Part III of a little catalog of things we do that help waste our time.
Learning
- What have you learned today? What has enriched you, changed your understanding of the world, or given
you a new view of history or the future? Learning something new every day is a worthy goal.
Take Charge of Your Learning
- Many of us let others set our learning agendas — peers, employers, or the mass media. But you
can gain much both personally and professionally by setting your own learning agenda.
Indicators of Lock-In: II
- When a group of decision makers "locks in" on a choice, they can persist in that course even
when others have concluded that the choice is folly. Here's Part II of a set of indicators of lock-in.
Top 30 Indicators That You Might Be Bored at Work
- Most of the time, when we're bored at work, we know we are. But sometimes, we're bored and we just don't
realize it. Here are some indicators of boredom that might escape some people's notice.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness, Problem Solving and Creativity and Critical Thinking at Work for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming February 27: Brainstorming and Speedstorming: II
- Recent research into the effectiveness of brainstorming has raised some questions. Motivated to examine alternatives, I ran into speedstorming. Here's Part II of an exploration of the properties of speedstorming. Available here and by RSS on February 27.
And on March 6: A Pain Scale for Meetings
- Most meetings could be shorter, less frequent, and more productive than they are. Part of the problem is that we don't realize how much we do to get in our own way. If we track the incidents of dysfunctional activity, we can use the data to spot trends and take corrective action. Available here and by RSS on March 6.
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